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If you're tired of seeing everything always from the same point of view, this blog is for you! Christianity, spirituality, inter-religious relations, South America and World politics and other stuff through the view of a post-modern, South American Christian close to his fourties.

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A Worldwide Nation of Supposed English Speakers

Hey you, you that speak English as your mother tongue. You from the USA, from Canada, UK or Australia, or any other country whose English is the first official language. Have you ever thought how English spoken media is so worldwide spread and famous even when people don't understand what it's been saying?

I mean, we use to dub movies in our language (in my case, dubbed in Brazilian Portuguese), but have you ever thought about how could a non-English speaking audience understand songs written and sung in English?

We simply don’t.

And it creates a funny, sometimes weird situation where people invent sounds with their mouth to fill in the song lyrics that don’t exist in either English or Portuguese.

It becomes funny because it sounds too weird. However, it can tell us how people from non-English speaking countries make a very extra effort to fit into the Western, English-spoken World.

I don’t want to write about exploitation and “cultural domination.” But you would be amazed (maybe scared?) to know that more than half of the World sometimes doesn’t consider what they produce to be culture (or at least “good culture”) only because it is not spoken, written or sung in English. It is kind of sad because, for example, Brazilians, with such a rich culture, suffers from what we use to call “straight dog syndrome” (“sindrome do vira-lata”) or “straightdogism,” that makes us think that what other countries and cultures produce is always better than ours.

But, in shorts, there is the good part of it. You, native speakers of English, don’t have to make any extra effort to absorb culture from abroad, since there are guys like me that can write in English to tell you about how we live. There is always someone trying to speak English wherever you go in the World. Lucky you!

I hope you enjoy the article.

Have you ever thought how people from other countries see your culture, and how it interferes with their life? Let me know in the comments below.